AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He crossed his muscled arms across his chest, covering his Gypsy Brothers patch. His body language said he wasn’t going anywhere.
I felt . . . relieved. I’d fainted in the corridor on the way to see Dornan, which was both embarrassing and tragic – embarrassing because I wasn’t the one who’d been shot in the goddamn chest, and tragic because now Dornan’s wife was by his side and I’d missed my chance to see him. My shoulder had been bandaged, just a surface graze, and the bullet had taken a nice chunk of flesh with it. But I was okay.
A nurse bustled in, a clipboard in one hand and the jar I’d just peed in clasped in the other.
‘Good news all round,’ she said cheerily. ‘Everything looks good from the baby’s standpoint. Hormones are still high. You just need to eat something. Your blood sugar is low.’
I sat bolt upright in the bed, as John and I baulked in unison. ‘What?’
The nurse’s face fell. ‘The . . . pregnancy,’ she said, all trace of cheer gone.
‘I think there’s been some mistake,’ I said sharply. ‘I’m not pregnant.’
She looked down at the chart in her hand. ‘Yes, you are. Your hCG levels are through the roof.’
I laughed maniacally. ‘You’re crazy.’ I looked at John. ‘She’s crazy!’
She looked at John, then back to me. ‘Do you want me to call a psych down so you can talk to someone?’ she asked quietly.
‘What? No! I want to see my chart. There’s been some mix-up. I’m on the pill. There’s no way I can be pregnant.’
My stomach was sinking, sinking like quicksand. I tried to remember the last time I’d had a period. Nope. No idea. I thought back over the past several weeks, of how many times I’d puked or felt sick and assumed it was the stress of working for a drug kingpin or murdering a DEA agent that was making me constantly nauseous.
‘This is a mistake,’ I insisted, snatching my chart from the nurse. She looked affronted. ‘Can you give us a minute?’ I asked her, motioning to the door.
Before I’d had a chance to read the chart, it was snatched from my hands. John read through the notes as I fumed on the bed. ‘Give me that,’ I said. ‘It’s got to be a mistake.’
John’s blue eyes looked at me over the clipboard in his hand. ‘It’s not a mistake. I just watched her test that jar in the next room.’
‘Oh God,’ I groaned, flopping back on the bed. This was turning into a fucking nightmare.
‘Congratulations,’ John said, and when I looked at his face, he seemed almost disappointed at the news.
I was pregnant. With Dornan’s baby. And Dornan was in the ICU, being operated on, and he might not even live to hear the news.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MARIANA
The doctors insisted on keeping me in for observation, which was ridiculous, but I wasn’t about to argue with them. The hospital was where Dornan was, and if his wife ever left his bedside, I’d be able to go and see him.
At some point in the night, John woke me to let me know that Dornan had made it through surgery. He was going to be okay, Allie’s bullet having narrowly missed his heart. The news made me cry. I suddenly realised why everything had been making me cry lately. Damn pregnancy hormones.
As morning broke, I was itching to see Dornan. John informed me, however, that Dornan’s wife had spent the night at his bedside, once he was out of surgery. I was getting antsy in my own hospital room, so on impulse I rode the elevator to the third floor. The maternity floor. I hadn’t been able to get the little baby boy from last night’s horror show out of my head, and I’d even had nightmares that he was my baby, and I’d been the one who was shot by Dornan.
I tried to tell myself that I was just wandering the halls to keep my mind off Dornan, but it was more than that. I was gravitating towards the nursery, and soon I found myself right there, my hands pressed up against the glass window as I scanned the clear plastic bassinets all lined up inside.
He was there. The last bassinet, tucked into the corner. He was asleep, his little lips suckling away at the air as if he were dreaming of his mother’s milk. The name tag on the end of his bassinet was blank.
My heart shattered.
That poor baby. Nobody would ever know who he was. His mother was gone and his future looked bleak.
I wanted to take him home and hold him and feed him and never let him go. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was that there were people like Emilio in the world.
People like Dornan.
Something brushed against the back of my neck and I jumped. I turned my face to see Emilio standing there, smiling indulgently at me. He was smiling like he knew a secret, and that made me fucking terrified.
